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Deus Ex Clan Wars Morphs Into Snowblind
Thanks to Edge Magazine for confirmation, in its July issue, that the Eidos console FPS Snowblind, shown at E3, "was originally designed to be a spin-off from [Deus Ex], but has since gone its own way." The IGN PS2 product page for Snowblind also backs up this little-reported fact, following previous Slashdot Games news discussing the cyberpunk-influenced PS2/Xbox title, then called Deus Ex: Clan Wars. Additionally, the IGN PS2 E3 preview mentions "Crystal Dynamics looked to Warren Spector and Ion Storm for inspiration and advice on this game", further confirming info on the "Winter 2004"-due title whose E3-dated preview at 1UP explains: "The city environment was dark, neon-lit and vaguely Deus Ex-like, but the feel of the action was closer to something like Call of Duty."
Honestly, Invisible War wasn't horrible gameplay wise, once patched. It was basically a mediocre adventure game. However, Deus Ex was an amazing game. Had Ion Storm simply made more levels with the DE engine, and released it as a sequel, it would have turned out better than IW. This is what irks many people. Not that the game was amazingly crappy, but that it had fallen quite far from an amazingly good game. Plenty of the design decisions subtracted from what they had to build on.
.ini configuration file contained values set for the X-Box. (And clearly marked so: 'This is for X-Box, should be ## for the Pc...') In designing the game with the X-Box limitations in mind, the game had cramped level design, and a horrific game interface. And this ignores the abysmal way they stored things like video settings in the save game, so the game starts up at 800x600 until you load your game. A necessary evil on the X-Box, but an insult to PC gamers everywhere.
Secondly, DE:IW gets flak for the slipshod way several features were implemented. Without the patch, the lighting engine killed performance on the PC, with no way to turn it off. The
--LordPixie